Thursday, May 5, 2011

Windows Phone 7 – Quick Tip #27 – Handle Landscape on Edit Views

When talking to the folks that came up with Metro, or really anyone that used their brains to create the most awesome Windows Phone 7 platform, they said when making design decisions the most important consideration was the experience provided for the consumer. Everything else was secondary…period. We should take that same approach when building our applications.

Case in point, one of my latest apps, ContactSwap let’s you enter your profile information. At this point I’ve grown to love the virtual keyboard provided with Windows Phone 7 and when entering profile information my screen looks like:

Not too bad.

Then I was out “swapping contacts” with someone and they had an LG Quantum. When I saw them entering their information I said oh sh*t. That’s not a very good experience is it?

So the moral of the story goes, even though you might be tempted to lock in your application to work with Profile mode to provide a consistent experience across the screens, you probably shouldn’t.

And instead of having:

Rather than, at least on your input screens:

For screens that don’t have to use your keyboard (which hopefully is the majority of your app) I’ve found that supporting either just Landscape or Portrait can really let you provide a consistent user experience.